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“Akiva,” hissed Liraz. She expected him to come to them. It had always been the three of them, advancing against the enemy, killing, and afterward drawing the rough tally marks on one another’s hands with knife tips and campfire soot. To them, Karou was just another tattoo waiting to happen, a line to be carved.
And then there was Karou, so ready to raise her hands and unleash Brimstone’s noxious magic.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Akiva said, but his voice was thin, as if he didn’t believe it himself.
“It is like this,” said Liraz. “Don’t be a child, Akiva.”
He was still between them, straddling two possible futures.
Liraz said, “If you can’t kill her yourself, then go. You don’t have to see it. We’ll never speak of it again. It’s over. Do you hear me? Go home.”
She spoke with urgency and resolution. She really believed she was taking care of him, and that this—this thing with Karou, so beyond her ken—was some madness to be forcibly forgotten.
He said, “I’m not going home.”
Hazael. “What do you mean, you’re not going home? After all you’ve done? All you’ve fought for? It’s a new age, brother. Peace—”
“It’s not peace. Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.”
“Harmony with beasts, you mean?” Mistrust shaded into Hazael’s expression, and disgust, and still, still, the hope that it was all a misunderstanding.
When Akiva answered, he knew he was crossing a final border, beyond all possibility of misinterpretation or return. It was a border he should have crossed a long time ago. Everything had gotten so twisted; he had gotten so twisted. “Yes. That’s what I mean.”
Karou broke her gaze away from the two intruders to glance at him. The hard smile had left her face already, and now, as she sensed his turmoil, even her upheld hands faltered. Thoughts of herself, her answers, her emptiness were forgotten, all overshadowed by Akiva’s anguish, which she felt like it was her own.
The police arrived. They hesitated in the face of this otherworldly tableau. Karou saw their baffled faces, their nervous guns, and she saw the way they looked at her. There were angels on the Charles Bridge, and she was their foe. She: enemy of angels, in her black coat and evil tattoos, with her lashing blue hair and black eyes. They: so golden, the very image of church frescoes come to life. She was the demon in this scene, and she half expected, glancing at her shadow sharp before her, to see that it had horns. It did not. Her shadow was a girl’s shadow, and seemed in that moment to have nothing at all to do with her.
Akiva, who a moment ago had pressed his face against her legs and wept, stood stock-still, and Karou felt fear for the first time since the two angels had come upon them. If he should take their side…
“Akiva,” she whispered.
“I’m here,” he said, and when he moved, it was to her. There had never been any doubt, only a hope that somehow the choice wouldn’t be forced, that the moment could be backed away from, but it was too late for that. So he stepped into his future, coming between Karou and his brother and sister, and he said to them in a low but steady voice, “I won’t let you harm her. There are other ways to live. We have it in us to do else than kill.”
Hazael and Liraz stared at him. Unthinkably, he had chosen the girl. Liraz’s shock quickly turned to bitterness. “Do we?” she flung back at him. “That’s a convenient position to take now, isn’t it?”
Karou had lowered her hands when Akiva came before her. She reached out, just her fingertips to his back, because she couldn’t help it.
He told her, “Karou, you have to go.”
“Go? But—”
“Get away from here. I’ll keep them from following you.” His voice was grim with what that would mean, but his decision was made. He gave her a quick look over his shoulder; his face was strained but set. “I’ll meet you in the place we first saw each other. Promise me you’ll wait for me there.”
The place they first saw each other. The Jemaa el-Fna, heart of Marrakesh, where she had caught his burning gaze through the chaos of a crowd and been pierced through the soul by it. Akiva said, in a voice hoarse with urgency, “Promise me. Karou, promise you won’t go with Razgut until I find you. Until I explain.”
Karou wanted to promise. She saw that he had thrown his allegiance to her, even against his own kind. He had surely saved her life—could she have survived an attack by two armed seraphim?—in addition to which, he had chosen her. Wasn’t that what she had always wanted, to be chosen? Cherished? He had given up his place in his own world for her, and he was asking that she wait for him in Marrakesh.
But something unyielding in her shrank from the promise. He might have chosen her, but that didn’t mean that she would do the same if she were faced with the same choice—against Brimstone, Issa, Yasri, Twiga. She had told Brimstone, “I want you to know I would never just leave you,” and she wouldn’t. She would choose her family. Anything else was unthinkable, though even now the idea of turning and leaving Akiva behind brought on physical pain.
She said, “I’ll wait for you as long as I can. That’s the best I can do.”
And she thought the brilliance of his burning wings dimmed just a little. He said in a hollow voice, still faced away from her, “Then that will have to be good enough.”
Liraz drew her sword, and Hazael followed suit. The police responded by falling back, raising their guns, shouting in Czech for the angels to drop their weapons. The onlookers cried out in a kind of ecstatic terror. Zuzana, jostled among them, kept her eyes on Karou.
Akiva, whose swords were less obvious in their crossed sheaths between his wings, reached double-handed over his shoulders and drew them with a harmonic ringing. Without looking back, he urged, “Karou. Go.”
She gathered herself into a crouch, and just before she sprang skyward to vanish into the ether in a streak of blue and black she said, both choked and pleading, “Come and find me, Akiva.”
And then she was gone, and he was left alone to face the fallout of his shattering choice.
Once upon a time,
an angel lay dying in the mist.
And a devil knelt over him and smiled
.
37
D REAM -L OST
Akiva was helpless to keep his blood in his body. It pulsed up under his fingers and escaped, riding the tide of his heartbeat out in hot spurts. He couldn’t stop the bleeding. The wound was a mauling, and clutching at it was a little like gathering a fistful of meat scraps to fling to a dog.
He was going to die.
Around him, the world had lost its horizons. Sea mist choked Bullfinch beach, and Akiva heard waves breaking but could see only as far as the nearest corpses: gray hummocks obscured by the fog. They might have been chimaera or seraphim—except for the nearest one, he couldn’t tell. That one lay only a few yards away, with his own sword embedded in it. The beast had been part hyena, part lizard, a monstrosity, and it had raked him open from collarbone to biceps, rending his mail as easily as cloth. It had clung to him, its teeth meeting through the flesh of his shoulder, even after he’d skewered it through its barrel chest. He’d twisted his blade, thrust deeper, twisted again. The beast had screamed deep in its throat, but didn’t let him go until it died.